All my words

Why would you work a normal job, as a beautiful shameless young woman, when you can be cutesy curated internet girl #5834 on twitter or discord or wherever else sad lonely modern men spend their time   and collect a comfortable living wage from this growing cohort of low-value males who experience you as a parasite on their tattered soul. who, on a daily basis, must feel so decrepit and useless that they actually derive pleasure from being used in this way. 

Everyone is online all the time. If girl doesn’t respond to you in a couple hours, she hates you. If job application doesn’t respond to you in a few days, there was a better candidate at this time. Everyone saw your message. No one just fell asleep. Everyone’s phone is attached 24/7. They’ve got me interviewing applicants for the company now. I’ve only been here a month. Folks sent in their apps weeks ago and when you reach out for an interview they’re available in 3 minutes. Everyone’s available for what they want.  

We lived in a house in Hawaii for like 8 years without paying any rent.   I always wondered how we were able to support ourselves there and why my parents never complained about the cost of rent like they did the cost of everything else until one summer day while I was visiting back home from college a bulletproof-vested man woke me up one morning banging at my bedroom door: COME ON OUT NOW! YOU WILL HAVE TIME TO GET YOUR THINGS. YOU MUST EXIT THE PREMISES AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR   and i’m like, waking up from an erotic dream, my subconscious smoothly weaving this verbal assault into the dream narrative, and as it slowly dawns on me that this episode of banging and knocking on my bedroom door from a stern serious angry voice I do not recognize at like 9 AM in Kailua Kona, Hawaii is in fact, real, and that this is really happening, my first waking thought is: oh shit, they finally got us.   Just let me grab my gamecube controller. That thing’s one of a ki...

Is what that poor girl said to me about 8 months ago in some idle banter.  I laughed, congratulating her on having said something mildly amusing, but it only struck me now: She saw a person with no personality. But not in the boring way. Completely protean, easily shape-shifting his identity for whatever purpose now fills his reckless heart. Happy to say or do anything necessary to get whatever it is he happens to want, no regard for any traceable “personality.” He won’t tell you what his job is or where he went to school or where he’s from or what he believes unless you force it out of him, and even then, the answers you get will be catered to the version of reality which best suit his current aspirations. He can’t help it. The past is just a story we tell ourselves, he tells himself.  

in the dream i’m sculpting an enormous marble or granite statue of myself, using a huge iron chisel and a hammer, and when the statue’s finally done I put it up on a big bandstand or platform and spend all my time polishing it and keeping birds from sitting on it or doing their business on it, and cleaning up litter and keeping the grass neat all around the bandstand.   and in the dream my whole life flashes by like that, the sun and moon go back and forth across the sky like windshield wipers, and I never seem to sleep or eat or shower, meaning I’m condemned to a whole life of being nothing but a sort of custodian to the statue. note: this one's half-plagiarized. but it's the internet, so who cares

Every time somebody undergoes an amazing weight loss journey or suddenly gets their life together or starts to succeed in their discipline… You wait long enough and eventually see the real culprit, the literal red pill: Adderall, every time. “It helps a little bit, but it’s not a magic solution for anything, you still have to do the work.” - Everyone who has started taking Adderall and suddenly notices months later that their life is in order and they’ve lost a significant amount of fat and they look great. “It only works for people who NEED it, who are PRESCRIBED ADHD by a DOCTOR, it’s a real DISORDER, if you don’t NEED it it wont WORK for you!” Whether you read this fairy tale on Reddit or heard it from your Doctor or WebMD or your zany yet productive “formerly ADHD” friend, it’s not real. Everyone is better on this thing. Until it kills them.        

is finding yourself locked in an epic mental war spanning several sets with some random banjo player in some random city in washington on some random sunday night for like $70 with a live audience and a stream and your getaway car parked in the handicap spot outside. And your opponent turns out to be a really nice guy, and then months later you leave your headphones at a tournament and he picks them up for you and keeps them in his car, and then his car gets stolen and your headphones die with him.

what happens when the reams of 20 and 30 something geniuses of the world start dropping regularly at 45 due to “heart complications” upon swallowing meth pills every morning for the past 18 years? what happens when the recession hits and the manufacturers of adderall raise their prices real hard because fuck you we’re a pharmaceutical company we can do that and we’re sorry that our product is so addictive that you will become comatose if you quit cold turkey after extended periods of daily use. give us more money or lose your job and starve to death.  

I suspect that I’m the only one at work who is a real person, and that every coworker and every client is a paid actor, engaged in a conspiracy funded by the federal government to waste my time, prevent me from writing the Next Great American Novel.

I’m 24. I look 19. I’m still leaning things.   This year I learned that you can’t put diesel in your car instead of gas.   No I don’t have a truck. do i look like the type of guy to have a truck. I have a ’99 Honda Accord with Pikachu stickers on it. I thought that Diesel was just spicy gas. I learned that this was not the case at 2 am this morning at a Chevron in the middle of nowhere. It was late and the gas pump was locked but the diesel one was good and I was like, well diesel is probably just spicy gas and I don’t want to go to another gas station… so this will have to do…   It did not do. I get in the car and turn it on and it sounds okay. And then I press on the gas and it goes KERPLUNK, KERPLUNK, KERPLUNK, loudly. it is obvious that something is wrong. My girlfriend is like what is that? I’m like I don’t know… She wasn’t mad. just disappointed. disappointed in me, disappointed in herself for choosing me. disappointed in every choice she made up to this point in he...

I hope I never meet these people IRL Because they definitely do not like me. There are no men on any of my teams. The women, my managers, the matriarchs, are sometimes impressed with my observations. They are more often exasperated, tired of reminding me to do things.  I have no relationship with any men here.   The one man I regularly spoke to, before he quit in May (not related I hope) was pretty much the perfect person, even though he was bald: tall, pornishly handsome, strong voice, leader at the company, good sense of humor, athletic hobbies, a recent baby, just fucking everything. I almost felt bad that he was subjected to talking to me, and he probably felt bad about it too, which is why he quit. Just kidding, I’m quite charming and in all honesty, he probably actually liked me. But the women definitely do not like me, because I am not a happy little worker bee. I am not "proactive with my accounts," I am not stirred at night thinking about how to boost Luminara’s sale...

Like most every other adult: it has become my main source of soul-crushing dread. I think: I am a totally capable young man in the prime of his life. I can do whatever I put my mind to.   But lately I can’t put my mind to analyzing sales data, spreadsheets, impression share, cost per click, return on ad spend, average order value, user retention, a million other worthless acronyms all in the pursuit of making my clients, the people who are paid to interface with me on a weekly basis, a little bit richer.   And I really could do it, I think, if I cared at all. But I don’t, so I can’t.   But I also can’t give up this life. This place, this girl, this car. These luxuries I’ve grown accustomed to as a result of my half-hearted daily efforts. But now it’s Sunday night, and you’re stuck at home staring at a screen preparing a “Search Keyword Performance Report” for a manager who, in reality, cares just as little as you do.

Is “Zach Stone is Gonna Be Famous” born of your insecurity that Zach Stone is really you, and trying to make a living entertaining people is such a delusional and frankly retarded endeavor that it makes you wonder if you’re going fucking insane and everyone hates you?

my dad would be so disappointed. and that would be a reasonable reaction to that news. sorry dad, our lineage ends here. our story ends with my homosexuality. we will never feel a special bond based on the shared experience of fatherhood. i easily physically could have passed on your genes but that’s just not who i am, and i was born this way. sorry bitch 💀😂😭

Novelists are so coy: let me weave you a little tale with twists and turns, lessons and truths, charming characters to love and beautiful scenes to imagine. And I’m just here like: Hey you on the other side of the computer screen. I, Thomas Johnston, am sad. And in 700 painstaking words, here is why:

He was too good to last. Too charming, too charismatic, too quirky. He had to be eliminated before his popularity raged out of control. I even feared for my relationship.   I paid a large sum of money to that devious fellow in accordance with his deportation from the USA promptly by the end of 2022. Negotiations were hotly debated, lasting for several days across several locals at which I underperformed, but I finally got him to settle for a cash amount of $3,500 dollars, sending me deeper into my crushing credit card debt.   It was an investment in my future. And an investment I do not regret today, despite the frequent calls I receive from these scary “debt collector” types, who sound like nice regular guys asking for your name and all that until BAM they remind you of your gross financial irresponsibility.  

Girls that like a young guy are like financial speculators. You are betting on his future. You don’t really know what’s gonna happen, if he’s going to be okay or if he’ll even be around long enough to support you, but you take a chance because you see potential in the asset.   Because you want to get in early, before it gets good. Though, living this fantasy, young love, is probably as good as it ever gets, for most people. Unless the experience of having a baby with someone is as world-shatteringly profound as the Breeders tend to say it is. But as a young man I say: I doubt it.

10AM in Manhattan. I purposely kept my phone’s clock back in PST to trick the Slack App so that my coworkers think I’m still in Seattle and not playing Hooky in New York City for the weekend to play Smashy Bros with the rats and homeless. Two clean-cut, long-sleeve buttoned shirt wearing, business-class looking 30s-40s white men have landed inches from my laptop to vaguely discuss their work through my noise-canceling headphones. Talking with their hands, maintaining steady eye contact, as far as I can tell in my periphery, taking coordinated sips of their 12 oz lattes. The focus drugs I took an hour ago are wearing off and it’s becoming harder to look at weekly sales report on the screen.

Maybe what I have noticed in my infinite primal wisdom is that people are susceptible to a sort of hypnotism or emotional manipulation when engaged in face to face communication that can obscure reality and make it difficult to logically process information. And I resist by keeping half a face turned at all times, deciding facts for myself, undisturbed by the alchemy of love.  

When you’re sitting on the plane and it’s just taken off and you finally, after about an hour of sitting and waiting, decide to shut your eyes to try to get some sleep and at that VERY MOMENT, down to the fucking frame your eyelids meet, the loudest baby of all time screams THROUGH your expensive Bose Noise Canceling Headphones and reminds you that you’re not really in control of anything in life at all. The baby won’t stop wailing and I can’t stop laughing. My laughter intensifies in proportion to the worsening cries emanating from this demonic little creature and its poor mother, who is doing her very best to silence him. Strangers think I’m nuts but I don’t even care. They’re right. After a while, I’m not even laughing about the irony of my sleeping situation any more, I’m laughing about the fact that the baby’s crying, like, generally. Like Ha Ha, you stupid fucking baby. You’ve been through nothing in life and it’s already too much.  

I made the font on my laptop really small to write this note. I’m on a plane in the middle seat.   Here’s the worst thing you can do to your girlfriend: Nothing. It’s easy. You don’t do anything. You stop responding to your recently long-distance girlfriend of 6 months, for days and eventually weeks at a time, like you’re in a war or something, while she texts you every couple of days with increasing panicked urgency, first worrying that something has happened to you and then eventually accepting that you have chosen to never respond to her ever again.   Begging for the opportunity to return my things which I left with her in Chicago, the place she helped me move out of, box by heavy box, before helping me set up my apartment in Seattle, box by heavy box.   All the while I know that our relationship has an expiration date. I’m not actively thinking: Ooh, I’m gonna break up with this girl. I’m thinking: Sam is nice and pleasant to be around. Why overthink it? Even if every...

The only thing I miss about my old laptop is that it was small enough to type covertly on airplanes.   And also the fact that it was gifted to me by The Gromet Foundation, one of the many scholarship awards I received for being a “low-income” student who happened to be able to regurgitate facts well in High School As opposed to my current laptop, which was gifted to me by the HR department at my first full-time job, equipping me with all the tools I need to “thrive” in our modern-day remote-work environment. I miss my old laptop because it was gifted by people who didn’t want anything back in return. People who, for really no good reason at all, decided that they would devote hundreds of thousands of dollars to help financially unfortunate teenagers from Hawaii bear the ridiculous cost of college.   I miss my old laptop is because my new one is a jail cell. If I quit this job, I have to forfeit this $2000 behemoth along with it and go back to the painfully slow piece of crap t...

I’m about 1/3 through my life, in real time.   But it won’t seem like that. Time speeds up as you age. As you become more accustomed to routines, more familiar with your environment, days and weeks and years fly by in a way that was not possible for your younger self, awestruck by every little thing, perpetually “living in the moment.” Every birthday since 21 gets a little scarier and less fun. Tonight I’m in New York City. Going to the Comedy Cellar. Alone. YOLO